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This paper presents a novel non-rigid point set registration method that is inspired by unsupervised clustering analysis. Unlike previous approaches that treat the source and target point sets as separate entities, we develop a holistic framework where they are formulated as clustering centroids and clustering members, separately. We then adopt Tikhonov regularization with an $\ell_1$-induced Laplacian kernel instead of the commonly used Gaussian kernel to ensure smooth and more robust displacement fields. Our formulation delivers closed-form solutions, theoretical guarantees, independence from dimensions, and the ability to handle large deformations. Subsequently, we introduce a clustering-improved Nystr\"om method to effectively reduce the computational complexity and storage of the Gram matrix to linear, while providing a rigorous bound for the low-rank approximation. Our method achieves high accuracy results across various scenarios and surpasses competitors by a significant margin, particularly on shapes with substantial deformations. Additionally, we demonstrate the versatility of our method in challenging tasks such as shape transfer and medical registration., Comment: [CVPR 2024 Highlight] Project and code at: https://github.com/zikai1/CVPR24_PointSetReg

Point cloud normal estimation is a fundamental task in 3D geometry processing. While recent learning-based methods achieve notable advancements in normal prediction, they often overlook the critical aspect of equivariance. This results in inefficient learning of symmetric patterns. To address this issue, we propose E3-Net to achieve equivariance for normal estimation. We introduce an efficient random frame method, which significantly reduces the training resources required for this task to just 1/8 of previous work and improves the accuracy. Further, we design a Gaussian-weighted loss function and a receptive-aware inference strategy that effectively utilizes the local properties of point clouds. Our method achieves superior results on both synthetic and real-world datasets, and outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques by a substantial margin. We improve RMSE by 4% on the PCPNet dataset, 2.67% on the SceneNN dataset, and 2.44% on the FamousShape dataset.

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) endeavors to understand human sentiment by leveraging language, visual, and acoustic modalities. Despite the remarkable performance exhibited by previous MSA approaches, the presence of inherent multimodal heterogeneities poses a challenge, with the contribution of different modalities varying considerably. Past research predominantly focused on improving representation learning techniques and feature fusion strategies. However, many of these efforts overlooked the variation in semantic richness among different modalities, treating each modality uniformly. This approach may lead to underestimating the significance of strong modalities while overemphasizing the importance of weak ones. Motivated by these insights, we introduce a Text-oriented Cross-Attention Network (TCAN), emphasizing the predominant role of the text modality in MSA. Specifically, for each multimodal sample, by taking unaligned sequences of the three modalities as inputs, we initially allocate the extracted unimodal features into a visual-text and an acoustic-text pair. Subsequently, we implement self-attention on the text modality and apply text-queried cross-attention to the visual and acoustic modalities. To mitigate the influence of noise signals and redundant features, we incorporate a gated control mechanism into the framework. Additionally, we introduce unimodal joint learning to gain a deeper understanding of homogeneous emotional tendencies across diverse modalities through backpropagation. Experimental results demonstrate that TCAN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art MSA methods on two datasets (CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI).

Image and video inpainting is a classic problem in computer vision and computer graphics, aiming to fill in the plausible and realistic content in the missing areas of images and videos. With the advance of deep learning, this problem has achieved significant progress recently. The goal of this paper is to comprehensively review the deep learning-based methods for image and video inpainting. Specifically, we sort existing methods into different categories from the perspective of their high-level inpainting pipeline, present different deep learning architectures, including CNN, VAE, GAN, diffusion models, etc., and summarize techniques for module design. We review the training objectives and the common benchmark datasets. We present evaluation metrics for low-level pixel and high-level perceptional similarity, conduct a performance evaluation, and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of representative inpainting methods. We also discuss related real-world applications. Finally, we discuss open challenges and suggest potential future research directions., Comment: accepted to IJCV

This work presents an accurate and robust method for estimating normals from point clouds. In contrast to predecessor approaches that minimize the deviations between the annotated and the predicted normals directly, leading to direction inconsistency, we first propose a new metric termed Chamfer Normal Distance to address this issue. This not only mitigates the challenge but also facilitates network training and substantially enhances the network robustness against noise. Subsequently, we devise an innovative architecture that encompasses Multi-scale Local Feature Aggregation and Hierarchical Geometric Information Fusion. This design empowers the network to capture intricate geometric details more effectively and alleviate the ambiguity in scale selection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets, particularly in scenarios contaminated by noise. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/YingruiWoo/CMG-Net_Pytorch., Comment: Accepted by AAAI 2024

Reverse engineering CAD models from raw geometry is a classic but strenuous research problem. Previous learning-based methods rely heavily on labels due to the supervised design patterns or reconstruct CAD shapes that are not easily editable. In this work, we introduce SECAD-Net, an end-to-end neural network aimed at reconstructing compact and easy-to-edit CAD models in a self-supervised manner. Drawing inspiration from the modeling language that is most commonly used in modern CAD software, we propose to learn 2D sketches and 3D extrusion parameters from raw shapes, from which a set of extrusion cylinders can be generated by extruding each sketch from a 2D plane into a 3D body. By incorporating the Boolean operation (i.e., union), these cylinders can be combined to closely approximate the target geometry. We advocate the use of implicit fields for sketch representation, which allows for creating CAD variations by interpolating latent codes in the sketch latent space. Extensive experiments on both ABC and Fusion 360 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and show superiority over state-of-the-art alternatives including the closely related method for supervised CAD reconstruction. We further apply our approach to CAD editing and single-view CAD reconstruction. The code is released at https://github.com/BunnySoCrazy/SECAD-Net.

One-shot video-driven talking face generation aims at producing a synthetic talking video by transferring the facial motion from a video to an arbitrary portrait image. Head pose and facial expression are always entangled in facial motion and transferred simultaneously. However, the entanglement sets up a barrier for these methods to be used in video portrait editing directly, where it may require to modify the expression only while maintaining the pose unchanged. One challenge of decoupling pose and expression is the lack of paired data, such as the same pose but different expressions. Only a few methods attempt to tackle this challenge with the feat of 3D Morphable Models (3DMMs) for explicit disentanglement. But 3DMMs are not accurate enough to capture facial details due to the limited number of Blenshapes, which has side effects on motion transfer. In this paper, we introduce a novel self-supervised disentanglement framework to decouple pose and expression without 3DMMs and paired data, which consists of a motion editing module, a pose generator, and an expression generator. The editing module projects faces into a latent space where pose motion and expression motion can be disentangled, and the pose or expression transfer can be performed in the latent space conveniently via addition. The two generators render the modified latent codes to images, respectively. Moreover, to guarantee the disentanglement, we propose a bidirectional cyclic training strategy with well-designed constraints. Evaluations demonstrate our method can control pose or expression independently and be used for general video editing., Comment: https://carlyx.github.io/DPE/

Videos contain multi-modal content, and exploring multi-level cross-modal interactions with natural language queries can provide great prominence to text-video retrieval task (TVR). However, new trending methods applying large-scale pre-trained model CLIP for TVR do not focus on multi-modal cues in videos. Furthermore, the traditional methods simply concatenating multi-modal features do not exploit fine-grained cross-modal information in videos. In this paper, we propose a multi-level multi-modal hybrid fusion (M2HF) network to explore comprehensive interactions between text queries and each modality content in videos. Specifically, M2HF first utilizes visual features extracted by CLIP to early fuse with audio and motion features extracted from videos, obtaining audio-visual fusion features and motion-visual fusion features respectively. Multi-modal alignment problem is also considered in this process. Then, visual features, audio-visual fusion features, motion-visual fusion features, and texts extracted from videos establish cross-modal relationships with caption queries in a multi-level way. Finally, the retrieval outputs from all levels are late fused to obtain final text-video retrieval results. Our framework provides two kinds of training strategies, including an ensemble manner and an end-to-end manner. Moreover, a novel multi-modal balance loss function is proposed to balance the contributions of each modality for efficient end-to-end training. M2HF allows us to obtain state-of-the-art results on various benchmarks, eg, Rank@1 of 64.9\%, 68.2\%, 33.2\%, 57.1\%, 57.8\% on MSR-VTT, MSVD, LSMDC, DiDeMo, and ActivityNet, respectively., Comment: 1 1pages, 3 figures, 5 tables

We propose a precise and efficient normal estimation method that can deal with noise and nonuniform density for unstructured 3D point clouds. Unlike existing approaches that directly take patches and ignore the local neighborhood relationships, which make them susceptible to challenging regions such as sharp edges, we propose to learn graph convolutional feature representation for normal estimation, which emphasizes more local neighborhood geometry and effectively encodes intrinsic relationships. Additionally, we design a novel adaptive module based on the attention mechanism to integrate point features with their neighboring features, hence further enhancing the robustness of the proposed normal estimator against point density variations. To make it more distinguishable, we introduce a multi-scale architecture in the graph block to learn richer geometric features. Our method outperforms competitors with the state-of-the-art accuracy on various benchmark datasets, and is quite robust against noise, outliers, as well as the density variations.

Registering urban point clouds is a quite challenging task due to the large-scale, noise and data incompleteness of LiDAR scanning data. In this paper, we propose SARNet, a novel semantic augmented registration network aimed at achieving efficient registration of urban point clouds at city scale. Different from previous methods that construct correspondences only in the point-level space, our approach fully exploits semantic features as assistance to improve registration accuracy. Specifically, we extract per-point semantic labels with advanced semantic segmentation networks and build a prior semantic part-to-part correspondence. Then we incorporate the semantic information into a learning-based registration pipeline, consisting of three core modules: a semantic-based farthest point sampling module to efficiently filter out outliers and dynamic objects; a semantic-augmented feature extraction module for learning more discriminative point descriptors; a semantic-refined transformation estimation module that utilizes prior semantic matching as a mask to refine point correspondences by reducing false matching for better convergence. We evaluate the proposed SARNet extensively by using real-world data from large regions of urban scenes and comparing it with alternative methods. The code is available at https://github.com/WinterCodeForEverything/SARNet., Comment: Author information changes

Reconstructing high-fidelity 3D facial texture from a single image is a quite challenging task due to the lack of complete face information and the domain gap between the 3D face and 2D image. Further, obtaining re-renderable 3D faces has become a strongly desired property in many applications, where the term 're-renderable' demands the facial texture to be spatially complete and disentangled with environmental illumination. In this paper, we propose a new self-supervised deep learning framework for reconstructing high-quality and re-renderable facial albedos from single-view images in-the-wild. Our main idea is to first utilize a prior generation module based on the 3DMM proxy model to produce an unwrapped texture and a globally parameterized prior albedo. Then we apply a detail refinement module to synthesize the final texture with both high-frequency details and completeness. To further make facial textures disentangled with illumination, we propose a novel detailed illumination representation which is reconstructed with the detailed albedo together. We also design several novel regularization losses on both the albedo and illumination maps to facilitate the disentanglement of these two factors. Finally, by leveraging a differentiable renderer, each face attribute can be jointly trained in a self-supervised manner without requiring ground-truth facial reflectance. Extensive comparisons and ablation studies on challenging datasets demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Point set registration is an essential step in many computer vision applications, such as 3D reconstruction and SLAM. Although there exist many registration algorithms for different purposes, however, this topic is still challenging due to the increasing complexity of various real-world scenarios, such as heavy noise and outlier contamination. In this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic generative method to simultaneously align multiple point sets based on the heavy-tailed Laplacian distribution. The proposed method assumes each data point is generated by a Laplacian Mixture Model (LMM), where its centers are determined by the corresponding points in other point sets. Different from the previous Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) based method, which minimizes the quadratic distance between points and centers of Gaussian probability density, LMM minimizes the sparsity-induced L1 distance, thereby it is more robust against noise and outliers. We adopt Expectation-Maximization (EM) framework to solve LMM parameters and rigid transformations. We approximate the L1 optimization as a linear programming problem by exponential mapping in Lie algebra, which can be effectively solved through the interior point method. To improve efficiency, we also solve the L1 optimization by Alternating Direction Multiplier Method (ADMM). We demonstrate the advantages of our method by comparing it with representative state-of-the-art approaches on benchmark challenging data sets, in terms of robustness and accuracy.

Lensless cameras are a class of imaging devices that shrink the physical dimensions to the very close vicinity of the image sensor by replacing conventional compound lenses with integrated flat optics and computational algorithms. Here we report a diffractive lensless camera with spatially-coded Voronoi-Fresnel phase to achieve superior image quality. We propose a design principle of maximizing the acquired information in optics to facilitate the computational reconstruction. By introducing an easy-to-optimize Fourier domain metric, Modulation Transfer Function volume (MTFv), which is related to the Strehl ratio, we devise an optimization framework to guide the optimization of the diffractive optical element. The resulting Voronoi-Fresnel phase features an irregular array of quasi-Centroidal Voronoi cells containing a base first-order Fresnel phase function. We demonstrate and verify the imaging performance for photography applications with a prototype Voronoi-Fresnel lensless camera on a 1.6-megapixel image sensor in various illumination conditions. Results show that the proposed design outperforms existing lensless cameras, and could benefit the development of compact imaging systems that work in extreme physical conditions., Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures, 1 video, 1 video description, and 1 supplemental document

Removing undesirable specular highlight from a single input image is of crucial importance to many computer vision and graphics tasks. Existing methods typically remove specular highlight for medical images and specific-object images, however, they cannot handle the images with text. In addition, the impact of specular highlight on text recognition is rarely studied by text detection and recognition community. Therefore, in this paper, we first raise and study the text-aware single image specular highlight removal problem. The core goal is to improve the accuracy of text detection and recognition by removing the highlight from text images. To tackle this challenging problem, we first collect three high-quality datasets with fine-grained annotations, which will be appropriately released to facilitate the relevant research. Then, we design a novel two-stage network, which contains a highlight detection network and a highlight removal network. The output of highlight detection network provides additional information about highlight regions to guide the subsequent highlight removal network. Moreover, we suggest a measurement set including the end-to-end text detection and recognition evaluation and auxiliary visual quality evaluation. Extensive experiments on our collected datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.

Face recognition is an important yet challenging problem in computer vision. A major challenge in practical face recognition applications lies in significant variations between profile and frontal faces. Traditional techniques address this challenge either by synthesizing frontal faces or by pose invariant learning. In this paper, we propose a novel method with Lie algebra theory to explore how face rotation in the 3D space affects the deep feature generation process of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We prove that face rotation in the image space is equivalent to an additive residual component in the feature space of CNNs, which is determined solely by the rotation. Based on this theoretical finding, we further design a Lie Algebraic Residual Network (LARNet) for tackling pose robust face recognition. Our LARNet consists of a residual subnet for decoding rotation information from input face images, and a gating subnet to learn rotation magnitude for controlling the strength of the residual component contributing to the feature learning process. Comprehensive experimental evaluations on both frontal-profile face datasets and general face recognition datasets convincingly demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art ones., Comment: Accepted by ICML 2021

Recent learning-based approaches show promising performance improvement for scene text removal task. However, these methods usually leave some remnants of text and obtain visually unpleasant results. In this work, we propose a novel "end-to-end" framework based on accurate text stroke detection. Specifically, we decouple the text removal problem into text stroke detection and stroke removal. We design a text stroke detection network and a text removal generation network to solve these two sub-problems separately. Then, we combine these two networks as a processing unit, and cascade this unit to obtain the final model for text removal. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches for locating and erasing scene text. Since current publicly available datasets are all synthetic and cannot properly measure the performance of different methods, we therefore construct a new real-world dataset, which will be released to facilitate the relevant research., Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures

Recent GAN-based image inpainting approaches adopt an average strategy to discriminate the generated image and output a scalar, which inevitably lose the position information of visual artifacts. Moreover, the adversarial loss and reconstruction loss (e.g., l1 loss) are combined with tradeoff weights, which are also difficult to tune. In this paper, we propose a novel detection-based generative framework for image inpainting, which adopts the min-max strategy in an adversarial process. The generator follows an encoder-decoder architecture to fill the missing regions, and the detector using weakly supervised learning localizes the position of artifacts in a pixel-wise manner. Such position information makes the generator pay attention to artifacts and further enhance them. More importantly, we explicitly insert the output of the detector into the reconstruction loss with a weighting criterion, which balances the weight of the adversarial loss and reconstruction loss automatically rather than manual operation. Experiments on multiple public datasets show the superior performance of the proposed framework. The source code is available at https://github.com/Evergrow/GDN_Inpainting., Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, accepted by Computer Graphics Forum, supplementary material link: https://evergrow.github.io/GDN_Inpainting_files/GDN_Inpainting_Supplement.pdf

We propose a novel framework for computing descriptors for characterizing points on three-dimensional surfaces. First, we present a new non-learned feature that uses graph wavelets to decompose the Dirichlet energy on a surface. We call this new feature wavelet energy decomposition signature (WEDS). Second, we propose a new multiscale graph convolutional network (MGCN) to transform a non-learned feature to a more discriminative descriptor. Our results show that the new descriptor WEDS is more discriminative than the current state-of-the-art non-learned descriptors and that the combination of WEDS and MGCN is better than the state-of-the-art learned descriptors. An important design criterion for our descriptor is the robustness to different surface discretizations including triangulations with varying numbers of vertices. Our results demonstrate that previous graph convolutional networks significantly overfit to a particular resolution or even a particular triangulation, but MGCN generalizes well to different surface discretizations. In addition, MGCN is compatible with previous descriptors and it can also be used to improve the performance of other descriptors, such as the heat kernel signature, the wave kernel signature, or the local point signature., Comment: Accepted to SIGGRAPH 2020. (15 pages, 15 figures, 12 tables, low-resolution version)

Image colorization achieves more and more realistic results with the increasing computation power of recent deep learning techniques. It becomes more difficult to identify the fake colorized images by human eyes. In this work, we propose a novel forensic method to distinguish between natural images (NIs) and colorized images (CIs) based on convolutional neural network (CNN). Our method is able to achieve high classification accuracy and cope with the challenging scenario of blind detection, i.e., no training sample is available from "unknown" colorization algorithm that we may encounter during the testing phase. This blind detection performance can be regarded as a generalization performance. First, we design and implement a base network, which can attain better performance in terms of classification accuracy and generalization (in most cases) compared with state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we design a new branch, which analyzes smaller regions of extracted features, and insert it into the above base network. Consequently, our network can not only improve the classification accuracy, but also enhance the generalization in the vast majority of cases. To further improve the performance of blind detection, we propose to automatically construct negative samples through linear interpolation of paired natural and colorized images. Then, we progressively insert these negative samples into the original training dataset and continue to train the network. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve stable and high generalization performance when tested against different state-of-the-art colorization algorithms., Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures

The typical goal of surface remeshing consists in finding a mesh that is (1) geometrically faithful to the original geometry, (2) as coarse as possible to obtain a low-complexity representation and (3) free of bad elements that would hamper the desired application. In this paper, we design an algorithm to address all three optimization goals simultaneously. The user specifies desired bounds on approximation error {\delta}, minimal interior angle {\theta} and maximum mesh complexity N (number of vertices). Since such a desired mesh might not even exist, our optimization framework treats only the approximation error bound {\delta} as a hard constraint and the other two criteria as optimization goals. More specifically, we iteratively perform carefully prioritized local operators, whenever they do not violate the approximation error bound and improve the mesh otherwise. In this way our optimization framework greedily searches for the coarsest mesh with minimal interior angle above {\theta} and approximation error bounded by {\delta}. Fast runtime is enabled by a local approximation error estimation, while implicit feature preservation is obtained by specifically designed vertex relocation operators. Experiments show that our approach delivers high-quality meshes with implicitly preserved features and better balances between geometric fidelity, mesh complexity and element quality than the state-of-the-art., Comment: 14 pages, 20 figures. Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

Connectivity and layout of underlying networks largely determine the behavior of many environments. For example, transportation networks determine the flow of traffic in cities, or maps determine the difficulty and flow in games. Designing such networks from scratch is challenging as even local network changes can have large global effects. We investigate how to computationally create networks starting from {\em only} high-level functional specifications. Such specifications can be in the form of network density, travel time versus network length, traffic type, destination locations, etc. We propose an integer programming-based approach that guarantees that the resultant networks are valid by fulfilling all specified hard constraints, and score favorably in terms of the objective function. We evaluate our algorithm in three different design settings (i.e., street layout, floorplanning, and game level design) and demonstrate, for the first time, that diverse networks can emerge purely from high-level functional specifications.